Techmeme: K-12 student database jazzes tech startups, spooks parents (Stephanie Simon/Reuters)

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March 4, 2013, 4:26 AM

Top News

Nick Bilton / NYT Bits:

Disruptions: As User Interaction on Facebook Drops, Sharing Comes at a Cost — Updated — Something is puzzling on Facebook. — Early last year, soon after Facebook instituted a feature that let people subscribe to others' feeds without being friends, I quickly amassed a healthy “subscriber” list of about 25,000 people.

More: Nick O'Neill, Echo Blog and Neowin

Tweets: @pkafka, @erickschonfeld, @hunterwalk, @om, @alexiskold, @joshconstine, @pkafka and @dannysullivan

Hunter Walk / Elapsed Time:

Other Reasons Nick Bilton Seeing FB Decline — NYTimes columnist Nick Bilton wrote today that he's seeing massive declines in organic Facebook engagement on his posts. He cites last year receiving hundreds of likes per post but now having 1/10th that despite growing subscribers 20x.

More: TechCrunch. Tweets: @zseward

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:

Facebook's News Feed, A Skittish Gift Horse — Remember Facebook Questions? Checkins? Spotify listens? They had their time at the top of the news feed because Facebook favors new products, but their prominence diminished as they matured. This and competition for space between posts …

Tweets: @joshd

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

There Was That Whole Internet Thing, Too — Anyone wanting to see the whole “history is written by the victors” thing in process should read Tim Wu and John Gruber battle it out over exactly why Apple has kicked the crap out of everyone else since the late 90s.

Tweets: @howardlindzon, @karaswisher, @peterrojas, @arrington and @mathewi

John Gruber / Daring Fireball:

Open and Shut — Tim Wu, writing for The New Yorker “News Desk”, has done us all a grand favor by penning a sort of grand unified theory on how the “open beats closed” axiom can be true in the face of Apple's decade-long success: “Does a Company Like Apple Need a Genius Like Steve Jobs?”

More: ParisLemon, MacDailyNews, PalmAddict and Patently Apple

Tweets: @cdixon, @rstephens, @erickschonfeld, @viticci, @digiphile, @dujkan and @panzer

Kristian Vatto / AnandTech:

Seagate to Discontinue 7200rpm 2.5" Drives Later This Year — Earlier today X-bit Labs reported that Seagate will stop the production of their 7200RPM 2.5" drives by the end of this year and I just got a confirmation from Seagate that this is really the case.

More: X-bit labs, PC Perspective, Forbes, Web 2.0 Asia Blog and HotHardware

Steve Mann / IEEE Spectrum:

My “Augmediated” Life — What I've learned from 35 years of wearing computerized eyewear — Back in 2004, I was awakened early one morning by a loud clatter. I ran outside, only to discover that a car had smashed into the corner of my house. As I went to speak with the driver …

More: Gizmodo and The Register. Tweets: @ak

Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:

CloudFlare Was Down Due To Edge Routers Crashing, Taking Down 785,000 Websites Including 4chan, Wikileaks, Metallica.com — Security and caching service CloudFlare was down for close to an hour due to an issue with its edge routers. It's now back up and running.

More: CloudFlare blog, Computerworld, CNET, VentureBeat, TechnoLlama, PC Magazine, The Register and GigaOM

Russ Buettner / New York Times:

Former Dot-com Millionaire Guilty of Selling Drugs — At the height of dot-com mania 13 years ago, Jennifer Sultan and a few colleagues sold their small technology company for $70 million in stock and cash. She and her boyfriend rented a large house in the Hamptons for the summer and bought a spacious loft near Union Square.

More: Business Insider, Daily Mail, Associated Press, New York Post and Gothamist

Surur / WMPoweruser:

Job posting confirms Holidays target for next major Windows Phone release — There has been some controversy about the time scales for the next major release for Windows Phone and its counterpart for Windows 8. — According to Mary Jo Foley Windows Phone Blue will come after the Windows 8 release …

More: CNET, The Next Web, The Verge, MobileSyrup.com, WinBeta, Neowin, Gizmodo, Pocket-lint and PhoneArena

Stephanie Simon / Reuters:

K-12 student database jazzes tech startups, spooks parents — (Reuters) - An education technology conference this week in Austin, Texas, will clang with bells and whistles as startups eagerly show off their latest wares. — But the most influential new product may be the least flashy …

More: The Boston Globe. Tweets: @stoptesting15 and @mikebutcher

Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:

Jolla Wants To Build A Foursquare Phone, A Facebook Phone — Whatever It Takes To Wake Smartphones From Their Android Slumber — Finnish startup Jolla is open for business. That's the message CEO Marc Dillon was putting out, loud and clear, during two on-stage appearances at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona last week.

More: Engadget

Colleen Taylor / TechCrunch:

Marc Andreessen And Ben Horowitz ‘Decode’ Groupon CEO Andrew Mason's Farewell Memo — On Rap Genius — When Andreessen Horowitz invested a whopping $15 million into Rap Genius this past fall, they were keen to point out that the platform can be used for decoding more than song lyrics …

More: Rap Genius and Business Insider

Ben Popper / The Verge:

Goodbye Groupon: Andrew Mason's dance with the devil

More: NYT Bits and The New Yorker. Tweets: @semil, @pkafka, @benpopper and @tcarmody

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